Despite of increased research focused on the tinnitus phenomenon and related therapies, the tinnitus phenomenon still is not fully understood and therapies mostly relate to fighting symptoms rather than cause.
A promising approach was introduced in “Listening to tailor-made notched music reduces tinnitus loudness and tinnitus-related auditory cortex activity” by Hidehiko Okamoto et al., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), 107(3), Jan. 19, 2010, retrieved and accessed on the Internet http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/1207.full.pdf on Jun. 7, 2011.
According to this paper, the cause of the tinnitus phenomenon may rather be found in neuronal cortex activities than elsewhere. In a central auditory region, auditory cortex neurons may be deprived from excitation due to hearing loss centered around a given frequency, i.e. these neurons may no longer be excited as a result of a sound impact corresponding to the frequency associated with the hearing loss. However, in the following these neurons may become sensitive to neighboring frequencies because of a rewiring of these neurons to neighboring auditory regions in the cortex. This effect may be understood as maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization. A synchronized spontaneous neural activity in such region may cause the tinnitus for the reason that such auditory regions may be characterized by less lateral inhibitory networks. When now exposing the patient to music with the tinnitus frequencies being notched in the music, the neurons corresponding to the tinnitus frequencies may be retrained in order to reduce their maladaptive auditory cortex reorganization.